Welcome to this, the 24th issue, of the Digital Digest
LiveUpdate newsletter. Well 2001 looks like to be an interesting year. The world
economic climate looks decisively bleak, and the IT world is not plagued,
everyday, with more job cuts and closures of major online business.

Apart from blaming the stock market for over inflating IT
share prices, I guess we also have ourselves to blame - we have gotten so used
to the Internet being a "cost-free" environment with free email, free
ISP and even free software. In actual fact, these free services and products
actually costs quite a lot to maintain. But when these businesses turn to a
pay-per-use model, there will always be an start-up somewhere that will give out
the same service for free, and so you'll have to increase services, at the
expensive of profit - hence making it almost impossible to have some sort of
profitable business online.

Will the future of Digital Digest be secure - perhaps so,
perhaps not - I guess in the end, it all depends on you, our valued visitors.
With your continued interest and support, I would say the future of Digital
Digest looks solid, but as competition heats up, and running cost increases, it
is harder and harder to maintain a good level of service - so if our website
loads slower, our downloads not as fast as before, please bear with us, and
offer us a kind word of here and then - it won't pay the bills, but it will
help.

Just a couple of days/weeks after our
last story on the development of the open-sourced MPEG-4 DivX codec, the OpenDivX
initiative, the guys at Project Mayo have released a new version of
their codec, designed for the Windows environment, and the result already
looks good.

Although the codec is still extremely in-efficient
(remembering that these guys are starting from scratch, and working for
free), requiring a Pentium-III to get acceptable performance, the quality
of the codec (if you ignore the bugs that may happen) is actually quite
good - better than the original DivX codec in some cases. With more and
more support for this codec, it looks like an efficient-bug-free version
will soon be released, and once this happens, the future of DivX, as a
universal ultra-compressive format, will be solid.

So for now, why don't you grab a copy of this latest
codec (called DivX4Windows), try it for yourself, and if you know a little
bit about programming, have a look at the source code, and perhaps you can
find a way to speed up the development of the codec.

Shortly after the change of
government in the US, the US Department of
Justice (DoJ), infamous for their fight against big businesses, like Microsoft,
have done a complete turn-around and has publicly offered support for the MPAA,
which in our opinion, is the largest and most profitable monopoly in the
United States.

"Despite defendants' efforts to pitch this case
as a classic story of the gadfly press and to cast themselves in the role
of the protagonist reporter who seeks only to convey truthful information
to the pubic, this lawsuit is really about computer hackers and the tools
of digital piracy," U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote in a brief that
was filed after the federal government expressed interest in becoming an
intervenor in the case, seeking a more "hands-on" role in this
controversial case.

The issue, in our opinion, is not about piracy,
hacking but about the ability of the MPAA and the multi-billion dollar DVD
industry to keep their stranglehold on the very profitable DVD monopoly. By
keeping CSS, the MPAA/DVD industry are free to charge DVD manufacturers excessive
fees (of up to and beyond $USD 1,000,000) for the purchase of a
CSS license, which we now all know is useless in preventing digital
copying of DVDs. Still, they are permitted to charge these fees for
something that obviously doesn't work. The whole point here is not about
piracy, but about monopoly, and how the MPAA/DVD industry can get profits
for every DVD hardware or software sold anywhere in the world, through the
CSS licensing scheme. And not the US federal government want to get in on
the action too, it seems.

So every time you purchase a new DVD movie in the US,
or elsewhere, or whenever you purchase a DVD player, DVD-ROM drive or a
DVD decoder software/hardware, be comforted by the fact that a good
percentage of the money you just paid will be going towards the fight to
keep you from using your purchase hardware/software to the full extent of
their abilities, and the fact that what you have just bought, according to
the MPAA, doesn't even belong to you.

In a related
news, two MIT students have written a 7-line (not including header +
comments) Perl code that allows you remove the almost non-existent copy
"protection" on DVD files.

"I think there's some value in
demonstrating how simple these things really are and how preposterous it
is to try to restrict their distribution," says Winstein, a
19-year-old MIT sophomore computer science major.

The code, for those that are
interested, are on your left.

Basically, DVD manufacturers are
required to pay a handsome sum of about $USD 1,000,000 (I think) for a CSS
license key which will allow them to manufacturer goods compatible with
the DVD format - that makes the above code worth about $USD 1900 per
character (not including header information, which is optional for an
additional $USD 317,490). In the end, all the cost will be handed down
unto us, the consumers, so the next time you wonder why DVD prices are so
high, you'll know who to blame.

We have just started a new fun and games
section within Digital Digest, for those who need some rest from all the
DVD/DivX playing, ripping, conversion, encoding and authoring they have been
doing.

Currently, the section is still pretty
lame, as it only features some link to some DVD/DivX/Digital/Movie related
polls, comics, jokes and some online games to relief the tension - more content
will be added as time goes by. For example, we've just added a poll which ask
you what you hate most about the DVD format (eg. CSS, Macrovision, Regions ...).
There are also some excellent The Boondocks comic strips that makes fun at the
current DeCSS lawsuits.

Just a note to thank all the thousands of people (3000 at last count),
including you, who joined the DVD Digest LiveUpdate program. We've spent quite a
bit of time developing this site, and making it what it is today, and really do
appreciate your continued support.

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